Waltz With Bashir (R) ***½
Defying all attempts at simple categorization, Waltz With Bashir is part memoir, part documentary, part war picture and part historical record. It is also a cartoon, as far as it is an animated film, although there isn’t a frame in it you could categorize as cartoonish.
Written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Ari Forman (Made in Israel, Saint Clara), Waltz With Bashir is structured as a personal inquiry, following Forman as he sits down with old friends, former soldiers and psychiatrists hoping they will help him fill in the gaps of his memories from the first Lebanon War of the early 1980s.
Forman served in the Israeli military as a 19-year-old but can barely remember anything he did there. He is especially haunted by the Sabra and Sathila Massacre, during which Christian Phalangist soldiers, as a reaction to the assassination of Lebanon President Bashir Gemayel, slaughtered almost 3,000 Palestinian men, women and children living inside the two refugee camps.
Forman can remember the sight of illuminated rounds fired by the Israel Defense Forces streaking across the nighttime sky, helping to illuminate the way for the Phalangist forces. But he can’t recall anything that followed and hopes his interviewees will help dislodge whatever is blocking his memory.
The stories he is told are recounted in vignette fashion throughout Waltz With Bashir, most of them narrated by the men who lived them (only two of the participants in the film requested their voices be dubbed by actors). The film’s style, which was designed by the Bridgit Folman Film Gang, is a striking blend of Flash animation, traditional pen-and-ink drawings and 3-D effects, rendered in a palette heavy on blues and yellows. The movie looks unlike any cartoon you’ve ever seen, and its depiction of the atrocities of war, along with its often beautiful, surreal interludes, reminds you of the vast and untapped world of possibilities that the animation genre still holds.
As Forman gradually fills in the blanks of his past, Waltz With Bashir becomes more and more harrowing, climaxing with a sequence in which the director inserts video footage of the aftermath of the massacre, making us confront the corpses of the real-life people we had just watched being murdered in an artificial medium.
The contrast is startling, reminding us that no matter how powerful or well-made a work of fiction is, it can’t compare with real life. Waltz With Bashir isn’t only a harrowing anti-war plea, it is also an eloquent and deeply moving argument that it is critical to never forget human atrocity, lest the past be repeated.
Writer-director: Ari Forman.
Producers: Ari Forman, Yael Nahlieli, Serge Lalou.
A Sony Pictures Classics release. Running time: 87 minutes. In Hebrew with English subtitles. Violence, gore, nudity, strong adult themes. In Miami-Dade: Regal South Beach; in Palm Beach: Regal Shadowood.
This story was originally published January 22, 2009 at 4:01 AM.